


strangers in the night

by em_gray



Series: AU fic challenge [9]
Category: The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue Series - Mackenzi Lee
Genre: Falling In Love, First Meetings, Fluff, M/M, i'm gonna be honest with y'all I genuinely have no idea what this is, in what century does it take place? no one knows especially not me, it's completely angst free!!!!, sort of set in venice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-06
Updated: 2020-05-06
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:41:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24035263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/em_gray/pseuds/em_gray
Summary: “Do you ever feel so happy that it feels as though the world is going to end?”
Relationships: Henry "Monty" Montague/Percy Newton
Series: AU fic challenge [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1640491
Comments: 8
Kudos: 18
Collections: TGGTVAV AU Challenge Fics





	strangers in the night

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pinstripedJackalope](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinstripedJackalope/gifts), [goldenthunderstorms](https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldenthunderstorms/gifts).
  * Inspired by [What Lurks Behind the Looking Glass](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23812708) by [pinstripedJackalope](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinstripedJackalope/pseuds/pinstripedJackalope). 



> hi guys! round 9 of the au challenge! for this fic I went with the bottle messages from pinstripedJackalope's (amazing) What Lurks Behind The Looking Glass. Hope you enjoy!

We meet as strangers in the evening.

And what an evening it is. The sky is the clearest cobalt blue I’ve ever seen, its colors deep as the ocean and decorated with stars carelessly scattered like confetti. The air smells of flowers and food and the gentle evening breeze carries along music and laughter. Yellow lanterns are lit, their light spilling over pavements in pools and lighting up faces and smiles and planting reckless sparks in people’s eyes. Time itself seems to have stopped: I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen the hands of the clock tower move. It feels like a delirious eternal night, the sun a thing from a dream - but with the warmth the city itself exudes, lights reflecting in the canals... I don’t miss it.

Existence itself feels a little lighter tonight, a bit less like walking a tightrope and a bit more like the dance it should be. One ball indistinguishable from the next, dancing over the squares and through the narrow streets, letting myself be engulfed in strangers’ smiles and perfumes, guided by the music. I lose myself in the night, in its rhythm, in its melody - in its utter craziness and its utter perfection. It swallows me whole, then spits me out on a balcony.

The fresh air grounds me. It sticks to my damp skin, running through my hair, and I don’t realize I’m still spinning until I grab the bannister not to fall over. The music of the night becomes less of a thing I’m a part of and more of a thing in the background, muted by the half-closed doors, and when I clench my fists around the ironwork, I realize that I’m trembling.

I let out a slow, shaky breath, bent over, and suddenly I’m face to face with my reflection, distorting in the water three feet below me. I look as pale as the moon and my heart is pounding for some reason I can’t understand.

“If you’re going to throw up, do it somewhere else.”

My head snaps up. I thought I was alone here. But there he stands - three feet away from me, serene in the night. He’s got his arms folded together, elbows resting atop the bannister, and he doesn’t even look at me. He’s got his eyes fixed on the moon, which illuminates his profile with the precision of a painter spending years on a work. He might as well be one - a character, put down with oil on canvas, and he’s so beautiful even this striking setting could not distract from him.

“...Sorry,” I say, not really knowing why. His voice had been soft and light, free of accusation, but somehow I feel as though I interrupted him. “What… are you doing out here?”

Right away, it feels like too intimate a question. Something tells me that right here, looking at the stars with just that hint of wistfulness in his eyes, he’s more at place than I could ever belong anywhere - and I’m the wrong element in this picture.

“Oh, nothing,” he replies. “You?”

“Just… getting some air.”

He chuckles. “Yeah, me too, actually.”

Only now I notice the fiddle case at his feet. A part of me wants to ask: _What’s your name? Where are you from? Why are you here tonight? Do you ever feel so lonely you feel like you could drown in a crowd?_

But I don’t. It feels as though it’d break some sort of spell - a spell belonging to this magical night, to the moonlight, or maybe even to him, I wouldn’t know - I just know that I couldn’t bear for it to be over.

Eventually, it’s him who speaks again. “It’s a good place to think out here. It’s so close to everyone else, but still, it makes you feel so invisible. As if Misfortune itself might forget about you.”

I soften my grip on the bannister, using it more as a support and less as a lifeline. “What do you come here to think about?”

“Nothing. Everything. The stars, most notably. But mostly just… nothing.”

I nod, as if that makes perfect sense. Maybe it does.

Then, it slips out of me.

“Do you ever feel so happy that it feels as though the world is going to end?”

For a moment, warmth crawls up my cheeks, and not just from the alcohol or the dancing, I swallow, shifting, prepared to turn around and run if this conversation goes south.

But he doesn’t mock me. Just rests his head on his hands and thinks it over. “Sometimes I feel happy,” he says eventually, “and sometimes I feel as though the world is going to end. But never simultaneously.”

I press my lips together. I’m not really sure why I’d expected him to understand. I’m past tipsy on this beautiful night, on the gentle sound of the murmuring water, on the lights of the city, and it all feels so much like a dream that I figured a figment of my own imagination would understand me.

Though, truthfully, I barely understand myself.

Still, hesitation in his voice, he asks: “Could you explain it to me?”

I can’t. I know it doesn’t make sense. How can I explain that this feeling - this feeling of lightness, of not a care in the world - feels so alien it frightens me? How can I explain that the second I let down my guard, I’m convinced Fortune is going to stab me in the back? Punish me for a few hours without the world on my shoulders?

Normally, I’d instantly shy away from a conversation like this. In the daylight, in sobriety, in common sense, I’d hear the alarm bells ringing and pull back at light’s speed. Tonight, I’m sedated, entranced by a siren’s song, hopelessly trapped and happy about it to boot. So I just shrug. “I just feel… as though it’s at a price. As if I’m stealing away my own future by being happy, even for a few hours.”

“All things at a cost?”

I nod.

He’s quiet for a while. “Maybe it doesn’t. Life doesn’t always make sense that way. Good things happen to terrible people. Terrible things happen to good people. Things just… happen.”

My heart sinks. I cross my arms. “That actually makes me feel worse.”

“How so?”

“Well, it… it makes it all feel more unfair! If I could believe things happen for a reason, I could tell myself that maybe I deserve it. But to know I’m happy when others deserve it so much more than I do…”

God, what am I even saying? These thoughts go so deep in me that they hadn’t even consciously crossed my mind before right now. Saying them aloud, I instantly know they’re true - heavens, they’re more true than anything I’ve ever said - but that doesn’t make it any less terrifying.

I sigh, focusing my attention back on the canal below my feet. Gurgling and calming and reliable, hitting the piers and foundations. The water is stronger. Everyone knows that. It’s a certainty like death is to life: right now, stone and wood stand strong, almost impossibly so - but as years and centuries go by, slowly but steadily, the water eats everything away. It’s in the tender way it caresses its path, because it needs it to flow - but in the end, it destroys it all the same.

But maybe that’s what love is about. The finality of it.

Everything ends. The good, the bad, and everything in between. I suppose that makes us lucky to be in the present. To travel the path from beginning to end. To live for the sky and the stars and the wind and the water and meeting strangers in the night.

“I think,” he says after a long time, “I think it doesn’t really make a difference what we deserve or what we don’t in the end. It doesn’t change anything. But to soothe our conscious… If we think we’re bad people, but when good things happen to us regardless, I think the only thing we can really do is strive to become worthy of them.”

I look at him, and he meets my eye. And for a moment that’s all we do - looking at each other. It’s such a simple thing, but the intensity almost knocks me off my feet. I feel bare and naked, with everything I am so on display I want to die. But his face is open, and it’s as if I can see right through him, too.

It feels as if we could understand each other.

Something wet hits my cheek. At first I think I’m crying, but then I realize it’s started raining. Softly, gently, the polar opposite of the warmth of the night and the city, but still so comforting that I almost break apart right there and then.

A hand sets onto my shoulder and I start, looking up. I’m met with a warm smile.

“It’s raining,” I say. Cluelessly, breathlessly, pointlessly.

He hesitates. “Do you... want to dance?”

I realize that I do.

I take his hand, placing my other on his shoulder, and his other finds my waist. I almost shiver at the touch. The music drifts outside, and it takes no effort to let it carry us. It must be a ridiculous sight - two strangers, slow dancing on a balcony of barely four feet square, eyes closed, so far away from the rest of the world, only separated from it by a door.

I’m not sure how long we dance. I’m not even sure the music is still playing. I’m just focused on how we move, so naturally it feels as if it’s on instinct, focused on the way the light of the lanterns dust gold leafing onto his skin, on how every time I catch sight of his freckles in the moonlight, it leaves me breathless. He catches me looking, smiles, and pulls my head against his chest, our arms falling around the other’s waist.

I couldn’t tell you how long we stay like that.

I couldn’t even tell you my own name right now.

After what feels like eternity - a happily ever after - and five seconds simultaneously, he carefully distances himself, hand coming to cradle my chin. My breath catches. His smile is so fond, but there’s a mischievous spark in his eye.

“You want to go out?”

I don’t even reply. Just grin broadly and start pulling him toward the door.

“Wait, my fiddle-”

We wander as friends in the night.

Sometimes we dance, sometimes we drink, sometimes we laugh, sometimes we find a quiet spot to stargaze in silence. On a particular bridge, he plays me a few songs, and I tell him it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard, to which he laughs shyly. For some reason, I tell him everything, and then he tells me everything. Not our names. Not where we’re from. Not what we’re doing here. But what we think about when we’re lonely and what we think hides behind the stars and what we think love feels like.

The important things.

I’m just emptying a bottle we’re sharing, and he’s studying some sheet music by the light of a lantern.

“If there was one thing,” I say, interrupting my sentence with a sip, “one thing in the universe you could know. An impossible question you could get an answer to. What would it be?”

His eyes dart away from the papers, taking his time to think it through. He bites his lip, passes a ghost of a glance over me. Just for a second. Then he says, “Maybe I’d… I’d ask how to help someone who… thinks they’re beyond saving. Who thinks they don’t even deserve help.”

I think about that. “Perhaps… that’s a question you should ask the person you’re trying to help.”

He doesn’t reply right away. “What if they refuse to answer?” he asks eventually.

“Then maybe it’s an impossible question after all.”

The next thing he says is so quiet I barely catch it. “But I’d… I’d want to help. I know they’d be worth it, even if they don’t believe that themselves.”

“Must be love, then.”

He looks at me, a little caught off guard. Holds my gaze for a long time. “Maybe it could be.”

I watch the stars. Their distorted reflection in the water. Their spitting image, freckled over his cheeks.

“What about you? What would you want to know?” he asks me.

I ponder it for a moment, eyes wandering back to the lights’ reflection in the water.

“I think…” I say, “I’d want to know how to love someone properly. How to care for them without hurting them.”

He considers it for a moment. “I’m not sure that’s possible,” he says then. “But I think wanting to could be enough.”

We share a comfortable silence, during which I put the bottle down at my side and he mindlessly flattens a dog ear.

Then, he sits up. “All right. I’ve got one. One thing you’d wish for.”

I chuckle. “Aren’t you supposed to keep all wishes secret? As in, not say them out loud?”

“Fine, then.” He gives me a crooked smile, then shoves a paper and a pencil in my hand. “We’ll write them down, put them in that bottle, and throw them into the water.”

“Perfect.”

I don’t know what to write right away. What _do_ I want? In this moment, I’m as happy as I’ve ever been. I look at him. He’s frowning at his paper, chewing on the back of his pencil, and he looks adorable. In the sky behind him, the moon haloes him, and I’m convinced he could be an angel.

So I put down the pencil and write.

A few minutes later, we’re rolling up our sheets of papers and stuffing then down through the bottleneck. The bottle’s original cork was already gone when we got our hands on it, so instead we crumple another sheet of paper and push it in there. Though I don’t think either of us really cares if the bottle would get filled with water either way.

Together - our fingers twined - we drop the bottle into the water. It bops under for a moment, then back up, and for minutes we silently watch it being carried away by the current.

The sky starts coloring lighter, and my heart becomes heavy.

The endless night is ending.

I’m not sure how we’re going to say goodbye. A simple nod before turning our backs, as strangers? A smile, as friends? A hug, perhaps? I’m already searching for the words and coming up empty.

I’ve said so much tonight. So much more than I ever have, or ever will again. With the sun rising and reality returning, I think that much honesty again would kill me.

I’m already gathering my courage when I suddenly feel a hand on my cheek. I look up. He’s sitting closer to me now - closer than I remember him being just a moment ago. His eyes are still warm, but now there’s a certain fear in them - a nervousness, unsurety. I open my mouth, still looking for words I know I’m not going to find.

He kisses me.

It’s brief but determined. A statement. _This is how I feel._ Then he pulls back, the question in his eyes. _What about you?_

I meet his eyes for five more seconds, as I process what this means. Then I smile, and kiss him back.

The sun has risen above the sea, still red and distorted by the illusions of the water, tinting the few clouds pink, when we properly break apart again. I’d expect myself to feel giddy, ridiculous, reckless - but instead I’m calmer than I’ve ever been.

This is right. This feels right. There’s not a doubt in my mind about that.

“I live pretty close to here,” he whispers in my ear.

He doesn’t even have to ask.

We wake as lovers in the morning.

His room is small and his bed isn’t broad - not that I needed that as a reason to wrap myself around him to the point I can barely remember the outside world exists. His skin is warm, and so are the sheets, and so is the sun pouring in through the open window. Curtains dance on the breeze, and I’m hypnotised by it. It’s the most trivial thing in the world, but so endlessly beautiful, and maybe that’s why I can’t drag my eyes away from it.

I’ve got one arm across his chest, the other behind his neck and I’m absentmindedly playing with his hair. He’s still asleep, and the steady rise and fall of his chest might be the only surety I’ll ever need in life.

Right when I’ve decided I want to stay here, like this, forever, he stirs. I watch him. It’s a sharp breath first, interrupting the steady pattern, then a frown, the fluttering of eyelids, and then I get to see his warm eyes again. His gaze sticks on the ceiling for a moment, then lands on me - my heart vaults - and he smiles that dazzling smile of his.

I almost pass out.

“Good morning,” he says as he rolls over onto his side and properly takes me into his arms again. His voice is so lovely in its drowsiness. It’s strange how natural it all feels - waking up beside him, seeing the adoration in his eyes, being the cause of his first smile of the day.

We lie like that for a while, dozing together, breathing falling into the same rhythm. I think about last night. About a glorious, delirious night that felt too good to be true, that I never wanted to end. I was so terrified about what daylight would reveal. So afraid for a good thing - the _best thing_ \- to end. So afraid to go back to feeling the usual hollowness, and fear, and sadness that scared away words. So afraid.

Right now, I feel a little stupid.

There’s no point to clinging to good moments. Life’s a river. There’s no stopping it, no matter how hard you try. The only certainty is that things are always going to change.

So why not try to change things for the better?

“Want to know something ridiculous?” I ask.

I feel him smile against my shoulder. “Absolutely.”

“Our wishes? In the bottle? I…” I chuckle, taking a deep breath. Last night, it had seemed like such a ridiculous thing to hope for. Something reckless and impossible. But right here, right now? Finding out that the sunlight, instead of bringing up painful truths, reveals a thing to be even more beautiful than I ever imagined it could be? “I wished I could get the chance to know you.”

He props himself up on an elbow. For a moment, it feels like pulling away, and I tense up. But when I look up at him, he’s smiling so broadly I can’t help but smile myself. I can’t help but knowing it’s all right. It’s all right.

He leans down to kiss me. Then he says, his breath still against my lips: “So did I.”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [To the Letter](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25006753) by [pinstripedJackalope](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinstripedJackalope/pseuds/pinstripedJackalope)




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